Thursday, 8 February 2018

Popular Kart Racer – Mario Kart Tour

An outbreak of Nintendo news had been announced recently among which was a Mario movie with the Despicable Me studio, the launch of online service of Nintendo and to summarize Miyamoto, the revelation that Nintendo’s is a `fun’ company and not a `games’ company.

However, the biggest news of all was the announcement of Nintendo which was their next huge mobile project - Mario Kart Tour. The game is presently under development and according to the company; the popular kart racer would be released in Android as well as iOS devices before March 2019.

This would be a first for the Mario Kart franchise on modern smartphones. Though Nintendo has not been sharing much besides a logo, there seems to be a lot from the disclosure and the time in the mobile spaces for Nintendo has been a hit or miss. Recently Miitomo their first experimental mobile had been shut down and Super Mario run excellently failed to convert interested player into playing players with its `one and one’ at a cost of $10.

However Fire Emblem Heroes in contrast had made $100M in its first year with its extremely profitable gacha model together with the Nintendo’s piece of huge $1 billion and Pokémon GO pie.

Nintendo Partnering with Illumination

The big question is where will Mario Kart Tour fall and how does Nintendo tend to monetize it? The company had announced that 14.86 million Switch consoles had been sold together with around half as many copies of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a straight port of game which sold a further 8 million copies also on the Wii U.

Nintendo is said to have more mobile tiles in the pipeline. Initially the company had intended to release five smartphone games by 2017 though only Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes, Animal Crossing, Pocket Cam together with the ill-fated Miitomo social app had made it till now. The Wall Street Journal had reported last year that Nintendo had been operational on a Legend of Zelda mobile title.

Moreover, Nintendo had also made an announcement that it would be partnering with Illumination for a movie known as Mario. Illumination is well known for animated hit films like Despicable Me and Minions. Besides the title together with a release window, details pertaining to Mario Kart Tour mobile game have not been disclosed by Nintendo.

Additional Mobile Titles in Progress

Tweet of Nintendo reads thus `The chequered flag has been raised and the finish line is near. A new mobile application is now in development: Mario Kart Tour! #MarioKartTourReleasing in the fiscal year ending March 2019.’Now it is left to be seen and only time will tell what Mario Kart Tour achieves in maintaining its relative success of its smartphone siblings.

While the Nintendo Switch had sold around 15 million units from the time of its launch in March 2017, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had sold around 7.33 million units. Nintendo could have additional mobile titles in progress. The company had observed that the smartphone linked revenue had been around JPY 29.1 billion, in its nine-month earnings report.